Plato’s Republic is dominated by the idiom of seeing: to describe the framing encounters, the ordinary business of our engagement with the perceptible world, and the extraordinary business of the intellect and its development of knowledge. But the account of vision that underlies all of this has rich cognitive content, which makes it possible to think about vision as a faculty that can be developed, improved and even perfected. There is considerable plausibility in this view of vision; Platonic art can tell us about our own aesthetic experience. This exposes an unexpected fertility in the analogy between vision and intellection.
M. M. McCabe is Emerita Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Kings College, London, and is currently Sather Professor of Classics at UC Berkeley. ‘Parsing Vision’ is one of her series of 2017 Sather Lectures on “Seeing and Saying: Plato on Virtue and Knowledge.”
This lecture is sponsored by the Departments of Classics and Philosophy, and the Argyropoulos Endowment for Hellenic Studies.
Tracey L. Walters is Associate Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, SUNY – Stony Brook University.
Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety: The Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World” (2014) and Spike Lee’s “Chiraq” (2015) draw on western classical mythology featuring strong female characters to engage in satirical meditations on history, politics, and sexuality to tell stories about the black female experience. Their classical interpretations both humored and angered audiences who took to social media to express their opinions about the artwork itself and the audience reaction to the art. When considering this public critique, the question for examination is how and why do Walker and Lee’s adoption of the classics problematize the representation of the black female body in the public sphere?
Sponsored by the Argyropoulos Endowment for Hellenic Studies and the Departments of Black Studies and Classics.
Patrice Rankine is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Richmond University.
This lecture is part of the ‘Black Classicism’ lecture series presented in conjunction with the ‘14 Black Classicists‘ exhibition hosted jointly by the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and the Library.
Co-sponsored by the Argyropoulos Endowment for Hellenic Studies, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, and the departments of Black Studies and Classics.
